Learn the science behind:
That cinnamon powder that you buy in your supermarket has come a long way. Because, even though cinnamon is such a complex and rich product, consisting of hundreds of different molecules, it is completely natural. In fact, often nature is…
Humans have been sweetening their foods for thousands of years. Whether it’s through honey, natural sugar syrups such as maple syrup, or by using sugar beet or cane sugar, it’s all done to sweeten our dishes. Which sugar you use,…
It smells nutty, almost vanilla-like, buttery, and just generally delicious: brown (or burnt) butter. It requires only one ingredient and just a little bit of patience. That simple process unleashes a series of chemical reactions which all contribute to the…
If you’ve never been to Chicago, chances are small you have come across Chicago-style deep dish pizza. It’s a pretty regional phenomenon and personally I haven’t seen it outside of the city, whereas in Chicago every tourist seems to ‘need’…
Cooking a pie in the oven is always a delicate balancing act. You don’t want the pie to dry out and become tough. But under cooking is probably worse, with raw liquid filling being left in the pie. Imagine how…
How cold does your freezer need to be for freezing that piece of fish in less than 2 minutes? How fast does your cooling water need to flow to keep a pipe full of soup at temperature? If you’re designing…
Long before that steaming cup of (Turkish?) coffee stands in front of you, or even before you buy that bag of coffee beans, your coffee beans have been on quite a journey. From plant to farmer, to processor, and finally…
The more you learn about different cuisines, the more similarities you can see between them. So, when recently learning about brick pastry, which is a very thin dough cooked on a flat griddle, I quickly learned that a lot of…
Every time we make a flavourful Indian butter chicken or spicy taco mixture, I’m surprised by the power of spices. Combining them well can create such a depth of flavour, that would have been almost impossible to achieve with an…
Have you ever seen those profiteroles or cream puffs with a speckled decorated top? The pattern on top almost looks like dried out earth, with a lot of cracks and spaces in between the darker spots of decoration? Note only…
So many cuisines have dishes that are made with super thin pastry. The very thin dough can be used for making anything from Middle Eastern baklava, Greek spanokopita, German strudel to Indian samosas. They’re all made with phyllo, or the…
There are tons and tons of recipes for apple pie (such as our Dutch one). They use different crusts, different ingredient ratios, maybe some additional add-ons. There’s so much to choose from. However, most of these recipes fail to mention…